When a Lagos importer pays a supplier in Nairobi, her bank converts naira to dollars and routes them through a correspondent bank in New York. That bank forwards the dollars to another correspondent, which converts them into Kenyan shillings before the supplier finally receives payment.

The money crosses the Atlantic twice simply to travel between two African commercial capitals. The journey takes three to seven business days. Along the way, fees accumulate in a region the World Bank has consistently ranked as the world's most expensive for moving money, with average remittance costs of eight to ten per cent.

Bani, founded in 2022, is among a wave of African companies working to eliminate that route. The startup builds cross-border payment infrastructure enabling African businesses to collect local payments via bank transfer and mobile money, pay suppliers abroad, and settle in minutes rather than days using local currency rails and stablecoin settlement—digital tokens pegged to a stable asset like the US dollar. The company integrates directly with banks and reports that customers save up to 25 per cent on cross-border transaction costs compared with traditional channels.

On Thursday, co-founder and CEO Rodney Jackson-Cole outlined the problem to journalists and creators at the Google office in Lagos with a trader's urgency rather than a banker's patience.

"Goods move faster than money on this continent," he said. "A container can get from Mombasa to Lagos before the payment for it clears. Every day the money is in transit is a day of stock not ordered, staff not paid, and deals lost. We built Bani because that wait is not a law of nature. It is just old plumbing."

That plumbing is deteriorating. Global banks have spent recent years withdrawing from African correspondent banking—the network of relationships that international payments rely on. Barclays completed its exit from the continent in 2022, and Standard Chartered has since divested businesses across several African markets. The impact is sharpened by the fact that most African cross-border trade remains invoiced in dollars and euros, meaning even intra-regional payments must typically route through banks outside the continent.

Each withdrawal narrows the channels that African trade payments must pass through, even as the trade itself expands. Africa's cross-border payments market was estimated at $329 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $1 trillion by 2035.

Jackson-Cole has approached the same question throughout his career from different angles: why is it so difficult for an African business to move money?

"At Prospa we gave small businesses accounts in five minutes, and then watched them wait five days to pay a supplier in China," he said. "The account was never the hard part. The rails were. So this time we went after the rails."

Bani has taken an unconventional path to building those rails. In a sector known for large funding rounds, the company has raised approximately $100,000 to date and operates on its own revenue. Jackson-Cole framed that as a deliberate choice as much as a constraint.

"Payments is a trust business, and trust does not come from a funding announcement," he said. "It comes from the ten thousandth transaction that settled exactly like the first. We wanted to prove the model with customers' money moving, not investors' money raised. The revenue came first. Whatever we raise after this, we raise on our own terms."

Asked about Bani's expansion plans, he pointed to the trade corridors where African businesses already operate: West Africa to East Africa, Nigeria to China, and the growing lanes created by the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), the world's largest free trade area by membership. The near-term focus, he said, involves adding currencies, deepening bank integrations, and meeting compliance requirements in each new market—something he called the real moat in cross-border payments.

"Anyone can move money once," he said. "Moving it every day, in and out of a dozen regulatory regimes, with every transaction accounted for, is the actual product. It is slow to build, and that is exactly why it is worth building."

Bani is an alumnus of Google's startup ecosystem programs and builds on Google Cloud. The company's bet sits within a broader shift: institutions across the continent, from the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), an Afreximbank-backed platform for settling intra-African trade in local currencies, to a new generation of fintechs, are working to keep African payments on African rails. If they succeed, the circuitous geography of the Lagos-to-Nairobi payment—routed out through New York and back—may in a few years read like a relic of another era.

For now, the importer is still waiting on her transfer. Companies like Bani are competing to reduce that wait to minutes and to keep the fee at home.